Judy Frater discusses Ajrakh tradition and the innovations made for the Connecting for India exhibition Rehnuma.

In 2012, the Kala Raksha Vidhyalaya Convocation was sponsored by Tata Power, Adani group and the K.J.Somaiya Trust. Today, Tata and Adani have their own craft CSR projects. The K.J. Somaiya Gujarat Trust now operates the design education program as Somaiya Kala Vidya. What happened between 2012 and now?

I have outlined key issues of craft from the ground level perspective: the essence of craft is handmade; pervasive devaluing of hand work challenges maker communities; to sustain a living tradition, artisans must directly access better markets. My solution was design education for artisans, promoting independence. The challenge was that quality education costs more than artisans can afford. The program needed funding.

Because craft has been positioned as inferior manufacturing in need of intervention to survive it was an easy focus for CSR projects, and initially Kala Raksha Vidhyalaya received much needed CSR support.

But as CSR craft projects proliferated, corporates found it more beneficial to keep CSR projects inhouse than to support existing projects. They opted for quick fix intervention: “helping” connect artisans to markets, and set up new companies to market craft.

Today in Kutch, CSR projects vie for weavers and dyers to produce for their brands. The net result is regressive. Rarely are CSR products designed by the artisans who make them; even more rarely are artisans named. The power differential between artisans and companies is even greater than that between artisans and money lender master artisans. Artisans become daily wage workers like those in the industry that produced the excess capital that must be invested in CSR.

Independent artisan designers now compete with corporate brands to employ artisans to grow their enterprises, and to sell small-scale creation at prices competitive with production craft. The CSR message is size = power, and individual artisans are irrelevant.

Gandhi’s concept of companies responsible to the society from which they derive resources and income had merit. But As Annapurna pointed out, the concept of CSR has been manipulated to benefit companies rather than address inequalities of ownership.

Corporates inevitably think from an industrial/business perspective. Sustainability of hand craft traditions rests on understanding craft as cultural heritage, not merely livelihood. Preservation rests on value. Artisans don’t need help. They need veneration.

Photo Credit: Ketan Pomal, LM Studio, Bhuj

Today’s craft is created for urban markets. In many regions of India, artisans don’t have direct access to those markets. They are beholden to “Master Artisans” for whom they do job work and who lend them money they won’t repay in their lifetimes, preventing them from leaving their workshops.

Enabling direct market access is a key focus of the design curriculum at SKV. In Market Orientation, the third module of the year-long course, artisan students explore market segments. Pictured, Amarbhai, a bandhani artisan student, and Shakilbhai, an Ajrakh print student and Kisanbhai, a weaver student study the presentation and pricing of hand-crafted products similar to those that they create, to gain an understanding of market segments and to conjecture about how their work can be valued. Students also visit homes in Ahmedabad to learn more about people who might purchase their work- contemporary end users. Through the year, they learn to make theme-based, market-oriented collections and work very hard to create unique new looks, which they launch in a show in Ahmedabad.

Yet, after the course when it’s time to go to an exhibition in Delhi, Mumbai, etc., the collection is left behind and “regular” work is brought. “This is what the market wants,” they say. The markets to which they have direct access are pop-up exhibitions and medium level businesses. This segment- like the original local clients- wants what it already knows.

For artisans, the urban market remains distant. In the local ecosystem men deemed even the little unknown of hereditary clients risky. Add the perceived practicalities of business and the push to scale up, and the risks pre-empt innovation.

Degrees of unknown can be managed by experience. As artisan designers gain experience and make the market more familiar, they can begin to utilize creativity to gain recognition as well as increased income.

But the process is slow. And we live in a fast world governed by marketing. Hard sell marketing leaves little space for exploration and can make us buy what we don’t really want before we realize it. Marketing can become a runaway train when it eclipses what is marketed. And marketers of craft often omit names and faces of artisans, reinforcing the idea of hands without heads –or curiosities needing help, like the example from the G20 bazaar.

So, the question is how to leverage creative capacity honestly to negotiate value in higher levels of the market?

Photos by LOkesh Ghai, who taught the course in 2020

Tausifbhai presents his work to family and professional juries during the “Merchandising, Presentation” module of the Somaiya Kala Vidya design course, 2019.  Presentation includes an explanation of the collection theme, concept development, and specific innovations the student did, in order to illuminate the thought embedded in the work as well as technical innovations- and create value for the whole of the work: concept and creation. 

I have spent the last week toiling over Folk Art Market (IFAM) applications. The applicants worked harder, creating beautiful new collections. My role is to enhance their work through presentation. Craft is presented in many ways.  Fabindia proclaims that imperfections are inherent. Bandhej glosses over handmade to focus on appeal. Good Earth presents products as beautiful and hand crafted.

Yet, in all cases, while designers are celebrated, artisans remain nameless.  “How can we promote them?” I am told.  “No one knows their names.”

How to position craft holistically, as the concept and creation of an individual?

In India, artisans presenting their work in exhibitions is seen as an opportunity to bargain. Artisan Designer Khalidbhai Usman Khatri is so fed up that he stopped going to exhibitions. 

IFAM, in Santa Fe, offers a different model, in which artists presenting their own work adds value. Yet, there is the lingering tone of: Buy this folk art to help /support the artisans and, increasingly, high value craft is difficult to sell.  “How many collectors are there?” I am asked. I try to present Tausifbhai, who studied date palms and celebrated them in his handprints, in the IFAM electronic straitjacket, squeezing the soul of his work into the title. The rest is just material, size and price.

But at the Santa Fe Indian Market, Native American artists earn name recognition and respectable prices.  And there seem to be plenty of collectors.

In 2016, when Hasambhai, a potter from Kutch, met Robert Tenorio in Kewa Pueblo, he was astounded at the prices his ceramics commanded.  But, Robert laughed, he didn’t start there; he started at $5.

How can an artisan gain value?  The final module of SKV’s year-long design course is “Merchandising, Presentation.”  The rationale is that artisans can gain full value for their designs only if they present them effectively. Graduates have learned to use photography and the power of social media to bypass prejudice. “I can sell unique work online, and no one bargains for cheaper prices,” Khalidbhai says.

Artisans build their names– and in turn collectors, by consciously presenting collectible work.

The late Hariyaben Bhanani explains the toys she designed and created to an American student. Hariyaben couldn’t bear to see scraps of painstakingly embroidered fabric thrown away, so she rescued them, took them home, and painstakingly patched them together to form elephants, camels and dolls that she stuffed with other fabric remnants. She lived the spirit of sustainability.

In her novel Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver brilliantly illuminates the climate crisis through a discussion between her Appalachian protagonist and an environmental activist. ‘Bring your own containers to restaurants for leftovers,’ the activist says, ‘and minimize air travel.’  Dellarobia hasn’t eaten in a restaurant for 2 years and has never been on a plane.  Nor does she drink bottled water, or have disposable income to invest in social responsibility.

The 99% have contributed minimally to the environmental crisis. Artisans of Kutch in fact live astonishingly eco-friendly lives. Designers of au courant sustainable fashion who come to Kutch villages seeking textile waste to up-cycle are routinely turned away empty handed. Original scale traditional textiles of Kutch were rooted in sustainability. Weavers used any residual yarn in finishing, or in the next textile. Ajrakh and batik printers recycled resist substances, and exhausted natural dyes. Village women stitched garments with no-waste patterns. None of these textiles used fossil fuel energy. Scaled up production today trades some of these principles for speed and income. Still, environmentally sound grounding is a good reason to use hand crafted products.

But even more valuable in becoming environmentally responsible is understanding the ethos of hand craft. If we slow down to hand craft speed, we can observe why artisans work as they do.  Vasant Rao meticulously collects the gold dust from a gold pendant he filed to perfection. Shakilbhai salvages the wax from today’s batik to use tomorrow. Hariyaben collects the textile cuttings from the tailoring room and fashions delightful animal toys. In the local craft ecosystem described earlier, value was the basis of traditional design and creation.  Artisans did not waste because they valued materials, their own skills and efforts, and their consumers.

The most basic tenet of conservation is that you preserve what you value. We can learn more than craft skills from traditional artisans.  Can we engage them as teachers in early education and invite them to share world views as well as technology?